How to Add Google Translate in WordPress

We live in a diverse world where people speak many different languages. According to Linguists, there are anywhere from 6000 to 7000 different languages in the world. Even though a lot of people can understand English, it is worth translating your site if a large group of your audience is from a specific region. Often while searching for development tutorials, we end up on French or Russian blogs. We simply use Google Translate to translate the site over to English. It’s not always the best, but it is good enough for comprehension purposes. In this article, we will show you how to add Google Translate in WordPress.

Video Tutorial

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Adding Google Translate in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate Google Language Translator plugin. After activating the plugin go to Settings » Google Language Translator to configure the plugin.

Make sure that the check box next to plugin status is checked. After that you need to select your website’s default language, and the languages you want to be available for translation. Once you are done simply save your plugin settings.

Google Translate not only allows your users to read a translated version of your website, but it also allows them to translate your website. Your readers can even help improve the machine translation of any page by suggesting improvements to Google translation. In fact, if you have a good reader base, then you can get your whole website translated by volunteers.

We hope this article helped you add Google translate to your WordPress website. Google Chrome browser by default adds a translate option when it detects a different language on the page, but other browsers do not. Do you think that webmasters should provide translation tools on their website or should they rely on the users to access translated version on their own? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Just installed the plug-in and everything is working fine, though I’d like to improve the translation for the languages I do know. However, both when I am logged and checking out my site on a private browser, I am not able to change the translation myself.

The plug-in page seems to suggest this is only possible in their Premium version. Is there a workaround or something I am missing?

Visit the Google Translate website directly in a separate browser window. In the translate box, paste the URL of your website. Select the language you want to translate it to and hit the translate button. You should now be able to select text and improve translation.

I love this plugin but the flags disappear when my sites fully open. That is to say I can see the flags until the site has fully opened and than all that is visible is the language box with a blank space where the flags were. The wordpress raindrops theme I am using is supposedly compatible!
But I also installed it on an obsolete them that doesn’t even show up anymore on wordpress named Techozoic and it works 100% and I can’t wait to see the customers it may bring me.

Use these tags, for center, for left, or for right.
Place one of those tags in front of the shortcode or PHP code. Then use a closing tag like this, , , or
Place one of the closing tags at the end of your Shortcode or PHP code.

Having tried a few different methods to create multi-lingual sites this seems the best. Manage the translations and have them done properly, and only in the languages you need and its great. I don’t think it is particularly good if your site is in Googlish, so make sure you only add languages you have translations for and its all good

Interesting – is therу a way to insert exact translate textarea boxes from Google Translator? For example – I have multilingual form for clients. And they have to fill it up in different languages, but if they don’t know one, then translation with google translate is acceplable. So, would be interesting to have google translate on site available for only form fields. Any idea?))

Is there any other plugin, which works just like google translate for chrome? I mean, it changes the site’s content according to country’s IP address? If I open my blog from France then its content should be in french?

It would be useful, for all your posts, to include a set of demo screen shot pre- and post-installation of plugins that you cover. Demo screen shot of how the plugin works will make our lives lot easier to decide for/against the use of plugin.

As a linguist I have to agree that Google Translate can complicate matters. I would suggest f you cannot have dedicated pages in chosen language(s) then use Google Translate but add a rider saying that Google Translate is only a program and not perfect.

I just uninstalled the global translation plugin after reading write up on SEO’s issues – duplicated contents and so forth. SO this is nothing like that, right? Btw if I were to create my own translated page, is it wise to do it in subdomain ie www.(MyUrlAddress).com/English or is it better to do it on different domain. Thanks

I can not agree. Translation from English to German is not “better than nothing”. It’s just horrable. In most cases it’s not even possible to guess the meaning of an article.
I can’t tell if it’s that worse in other languages too, but for EN DE it’s a No-Go.

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